VIII
The private war between Mr. Polly and Uncle Jim for the possession of
the Potwell Inn fell naturally into three chief campaigns. There was
first of all the great campaign which ended in the triumphant eviction
of Uncle Jim from the inn premises, there came next after a brief
interval the futile invasions of the premises by Uncle Jim that
culminated in the Battle of the Dead Eel, and after some months of
involuntary truce there was the last supreme conflict of the Night
Surprise. Each of these campaigns merits a section to itself.
Mr. Polly re-entered the inn discreetly. He found the plump woman
seated in her bar, her eyes a-stare, her face white and wet with
tears. "O God!" she was saying over and over again. "O God!" The air
was full of a spirituous reek, and on the sanded boards in front of
the bar were the fragments of a broken bottle and an overturned glass.
She turned her despair at the sound of his entry, and despair gave
place to astonishment.
"You come back!" she said.
"Ra-ther," said Mr. Polly.
"He's--he's mad drunk and looking for her."
"Where is she?"
"Locked upstairs."
"Haven't you sent to the police?"
"No one to send."
"I'll see to it," said Mr. Polly. "Out this way?"
She nodded.
He went to the crinkly paned window and peered out. Uncle Jim was
coming down the garden path towards the house, his hands in his
pockets and singing hoarsely. Mr. Polly remembered afterwards with
pride and amazement that he felt neither faint nor rigid. He glanced
round him, seized a bottle of beer by the neck as an improvised club,
and went out by the garden door. Uncle Jim stopped amazed. His brain
did not instantly rise to the new posture of things. "You!" he cried,
and stopped for a moment. "You--_scoot!_"
"_Your_ job," said Mr. Polly, and advanced some paces.
Uncle Jim stood swaying with wrathful astonishment and then darted
forward with clutching hands. Mr. Polly felt that if his antagonist
closed he was lost, and smote with all his force at the ugly head
before him. Smash went the bottle, and Uncle Jim staggered,
half-stunned by the blow and blinded with beer.
The lapses and leaps of the human mind are for ever mysterious. Mr.
Polly had never expected that bottle to break. In the instant he felt
disarmed and helpless. Before him was Uncle Jim, infuriated and
evidently still coming on, and for defence was nothing but the neck of
a bottle.
For a time our Mr. Polly has figured heroic. Now comes the fall again;
he sounded abject terror; he dropped that ineffectual scrap of glass
and turned and fled round the corner of the house.
"Bolls!" came the thick voice of the enemy behind him as one who
accepts a challenge, and bleeding, but indomitable, Uncle Jim entered
the house.
"Bolls!" he said, surveying the bar. "Fightin' with bolls! I'll show
'im fightin' with bolls!"
Uncle Jim had learnt all about fighting with bottles in the
Reformatory Home. Regardless of his terror-stricken aunt he ranged
among the bottled beer and succeeded after one or two failures in
preparing two bottles to his satisfaction by knocking off the bottoms,
and gripping them dagger-wise by the necks. So prepared, he went forth
again to destroy Mr. Polly.
Mr. Polly, freed from the sense of urgent pursuit, had halted beyond
the raspberry canes and rallied his courage. The sense of Uncle Jim
victorious in the house restored his manhood. He went round by the
outhouses to the riverside, seeking a weapon, and found an old paddle
boat hook. With this he smote Uncle Jim as he emerged by the door of
the tap. Uncle Jim, blaspheming dreadfully and with dire stabbing
intimations in either hand, came through the splintering paddle like a
circus rider through a paper hoop, and once more Mr. Polly dropped his
weapon and fled.
A careless observer watching him sprint round and round the inn in
front of the lumbering and reproachful pursuit of Uncle Jim might have
formed an altogether erroneous estimate of the issue of the campaign.
Certain compensating qualities of the very greatest military value
were appearing in Mr. Polly even as he ran; if Uncle Jim had strength
and brute courage and the rich toughening experience a Reformatory
Home affords, Mr. Polly was nevertheless sober, more mobile and with a
mind now stimulated to an almost incredible nimbleness. So that he not
only gained on Uncle Jim, but thought what use he might make of this
advantage. The word "strategious" flamed red across the tumult of his
mind. As he came round the house for the third time, he darted
suddenly into the yard, swung the door to behind himself and bolted
it, seized the zinc pig's pail that stood by the entrance to the
kitchen and had it neatly and resonantly over Uncle Jim's head as he
came belatedly in round the outhouse on the other side. One of the
splintered bottles jabbed Mr. Polly's ear--at the time it seemed of no
importance--and then Uncle Jim was down and writhing dangerously and
noisily upon the yard tiles, with his head still in the pig pail and
his bottles gone to splinters, and Mr. Polly was fastening the kitchen
door against him.
"Can't go on like this for ever," said Mr. Polly, whooping for breath,
and selecting a weapon from among the brooms that stood behind the
kitchen door.
Uncle Jim was losing his head. He was up and kicking the door and
bellowing unamiable proposals and invitations, so that a strategist
emerging silently by the tap door could locate him without difficulty,
steal upon him unawares and--!
But before that felling blow could be delivered Uncle Jim's ear had
caught a footfall, and he turned. Mr. Polly quailed and lowered his
broom,--a fatal hesitation.
"_Now_ I got you!" cried Uncle Jim, dancing forward in a disconcerting
zigzag.
He rushed to close, and Mr. Polly stopped him neatly, as it were a
miracle, with the head of the broom across his chest. Uncle Jim seized
the broom with both hands. "Lea-go!" he said, and tugged. Mr. Polly
shook his head, tugged, and showed pale, compressed lips. Both tugged.
Then Uncle Jim tried to get round the end of the broom; Mr. Polly
circled away. They began to circle about one another, both tugging
hard, both intensely watchful of the slightest initiative on the part
of the other. Mr. Polly wished brooms were longer, twelve or thirteen
feet, for example; Uncle Jim was clearly for shortness in brooms. He
wasted breath in saying what was to happen shortly, sanguinary,
oriental soul-blenching things, when the broom no longer separated
them. Mr. Polly thought he had never seen an uglier person. Suddenly
Uncle Jim flashed into violent activity, but alcohol slows movement,
and Mr. Polly was equal to him. Then Uncle Jim tried jerks, and for a
terrible instant seemed to have the broom out of Mr. Polly's hands.
But Mr. Polly recovered it with the clutch of a drowning man. Then
Uncle Jim drove suddenly at Mr. Polly's midriff, but again Mr. Polly
was ready and swept him round in a circle. Then suddenly a wild hope
filled Mr. Polly. He saw the river was very near, the post to which
the punt was tied not three yards away. With a wild yell, he sent the
broom home into his antagonist's ribs.
"Woosh!" he cried, as the resistance gave.
"Oh! _Gaw_!" said Uncle Jim, going backward helplessly, and Mr. Polly
thrust hard and abandoned the broom to the enemy's despairing clutch.
Splash! Uncle Jim was in the water and Mr. Polly had leapt like a cat
aboard the ferry punt and grasped the pole.
Up came Uncle Jim spluttering and dripping. "You (unprofitable matter,
and printing it would lead to a censorship of novels)! You know I got
a weak _chess_!"
The pole took him in the throat and drove him backward and downwards.
"Lea go!" cried Uncle Jim, staggering and with real terror in his once
awful eyes.
Splash! Down he fell backwards into a frothing mass of water with Mr.
Polly jabbing at him. Under water he turned round and came up again as
if in flight towards the middle of the river. Directly his head
reappeared Mr. Polly had him between the shoulders and under again,
bubbling thickly. A hand clutched and disappeared.
It was stupendous! Mr. Polly had discovered the heel of Achilles.
Uncle Jim had no stomach for cold water. The broom floated away,
pitching gently on the swell. Mr. Polly, infuriated with victory,
thrust Uncle Jim under again, and drove the punt round on its chain in
such a manner that when Uncle Jim came up for the fourth time--and now
he was nearly out of his depth, too buoyed up to walk and apparently
nearly helpless,--Mr. Polly, fortunately for them both, could not
reach him. Uncle Jim made the clumsy gestures of those who struggle
insecurely in the water. "Keep out," said Mr. Polly. Uncle Jim with a
great effort got a footing, emerged until his arm-pits were out of
water, until his waistcoat buttons showed, one by one, till scarcely
two remained, and made for the camp sheeting.
"Keep out!" cried Mr. Polly, and leapt off the punt and followed the
movements of his victim along the shore.
"I tell you I got a weak chess," said Uncle Jim, moistly. "This ain't
fair fightin'."
"Keep out!" said Mr. Polly.
"This ain't fair fightin'," said Uncle Jim, almost weeping, and all
his terrors had gone.
"Keep out!" said Mr. Polly, with an accurately poised pole.
"I tell you I got to land, you Fool," said Uncle Jim, with a sort of
despairing wrathfulness, and began moving down-stream.
"You keep out," said Mr. Polly in parallel movement. "Don't you ever
land on this place again!..."
Slowly, argumentatively, and reluctantly, Uncle Jim waded down-stream.
He tried threats, he tried persuasion, he even tried a belated note of
pathos; Mr. Polly remained inexorable, if in secret a little perplexed
as to the outcome of the situation. "This cold's getting to my
_marrer_!" said Uncle Jim.
"You want cooling. You keep out in it," said Mr. Polly.
They came round the bend into sight of Nicholson's ait, where the
backwater runs down to the Potwell Mill. And there, after much parley
and several feints, Uncle Jim made a desperate effort and struggled
into clutch of the overhanging _osiers_ on the island, and so got out
of the water with the millstream between them. He emerged dripping and
muddy and vindictive. "By _Gaw_!" he said. "I'll skin you for this!"
"You keep off or I'll do worse to you," said Mr. Polly.
The spirit was out of Uncle Jim for the time, and he turned away to
struggle through the _osiers_ towards the mill, leaving a shining
trail of water among the green-grey stems.
Mr. Polly returned slowly and thoughtfully to the inn, and suddenly
his mind began to bubble with phrases. The plump woman stood at the
top of the steps that led up to the inn door to greet him.
"Law!" she cried as he drew near, "'asn't 'e killed you?"
"Do I look like it?" said Mr. Polly.
"But where's Jim?"
"Gone off."
"'E was mad drunk and dangerous!"
"I put him in the river," said Mr. Polly. "That toned down his
alcolaceous frenzy! I gave him a bit of a doing altogether."
"Hain't he 'urt you?"
"Not a bit of it!"
"Then what's all that blood beside your ear?"
Mr. Polly felt. "Quite a cut! Funny how one overlooks things! Heated
moments! He must have done that when he jabbed about with those
bottles. Hullo, Kiddy! You venturing downstairs again?"
"Ain't he killed you?" asked the little girl.
"Well!"
"I wish I'd seen more of the fighting."
"Didn't you?"
"All I saw was you running round the house and Uncle Jim after you."
There was a little pause. "I was leading him on," said Mr. Polly.
"Someone's shouting at the ferry," she said.
"Right O. But you won't see any more of Uncle Jim for a bit. We've
been having a _conversazione_ about that."
"I believe it _is_ Uncle Jim," said the little girl.
"Then he can wait," said Mr. Polly shortly.
He turned round and listened for the words that drifted across from
the little figure on the opposite bank. So far as he could judge,
Uncle Jim was making an appointment for the morrow. He replied with a
defiant movement of the punt pole. The little figure was convulsed for
a moment and then went on its way upstream--fiercely.
So it was the first campaign ended in an insecure victory.
